This blog is about struggles for the control of corporations. For the most part, I'll focus on public corporations headquartered in the United States, issuing securities according to the rules stipulated by the SEC in Washington and (typically) governing their affairs by the laws and judicial decisions of the state of Delaware.
My own prejudices are ... well, I think I'll let you work them out as we proceed day to day.

Monday, April 30, 2012

Robert Caro has been working on a multi-volume life of the
36th President, called The
Years of Lyndon Johnson, for more than forty of his and our years now. The first volume of
the set, The Path to Power, appeared
in 1982, when Caro’s professional reputation as historian and biographer turned
on his work on the New York parks-and-highways maven Robert Moses. Important as
Moses was for that metro area: this was bigger game.

The Path to Power related the
first thirty-three years of Johnson’s life, including his first election to the
House of Representatives in 1937. In that period, Johnson was at least on the
surface a devotee of the New Deal, and was in particular associated with rural
electrification. But Caro sees all of Johnson’s devotions during the Roosevelt
years through the lens of his protagonist's overweening ambition. In this 1982 volume, Caro stressed that a close
tie to the REA gave Johnson an instrument, one that he could and did use to
build his own political machine in Texas.

The second volume, Means
of Ascent (1990), focused on Johnson’s elevation to the U.S. Senate in 1948. The key votes, in the Texas of that time, were those cast in the
Democratic primary, since the defeat of the Republican was a mere formality. Johnson’s
primary election opponent in 1948 was former Governor Coke Stevenson. Caro argues that
Johnson’s defeat of Stevenson was blatant theft. Nonetheless, the Democratic
state convention upheld Johnson’s victory, and he prevailed in the resulting
litigation with some help from attorney Abe Fortas, a man he would in the
fullness of time put on the U.S. Supreme Court.

TESTING: DO I HAVE THE SAME TROUBLES here as with the other blog? If not, one plausible hypothesis is that there is just too much in the other blog, and it may make sense to start from scratch.

.

The IRS Code permits the owner of mineral rights to account
for the reduction of the available value as reserves are brought to the surface
and exploited. This is not on its face a glaring “loophole;” it is closely
analogous to the depreciation of the value of machinery.

Whatever the factual rate of depletion might be, the
statutory (?) rate of depletion in the case of oil and gas is 15 percent of the
gross income from the property, based on average daily production, up to the
depletable quantity.

The review in the form in which I sent it to Henry did not contain any material about Johnson's role in depletion allowance controversy. Hey. This is neat. I can type at will in this blog. So the problem must be overcrowding.

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LBJ told Weisl that "your folks (his clients in the securities business, presumably) should take the hint that"this thing ... this assassin may ... have a lot more complications that you know about....It may lie deeper than you think."

The message clearly was that Wall Street should show its own faith in and solidarity with Johnson, because he was going to save the system from the shadowy forces represented by the assassin.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

That is my own clumsy graphing, assisted by XE.com and an educational website.

The subject of the graph is the fluctuations of the euro against the dollar over the last crisis-ridden year.

I've used an arbitrary date in the middle of each covered month (the 12th) as that month's data point.

How does this correlate with some of the events of the unfolding crises regarding Euro sovereign debt during this period?

Last May and June, when the euro was circa .70, saw German politicians in particular taking a hard stand against assistance for Greece. That stance began to soften a bit in late June, when Merkel agreed to work with the ECB to line up the participation on private investors in a restructuring. It appears that this helped the euro's value, which reached .73 that September.

The markets' attentions shifted to Italy by September, though. That month S&P downgraded seven Italian banks, and there was some fall-back. Then in November, the Italians managed to rid themselves of Silvio Berlusconi and Mario Monti became the new PM there. Europe's bankers have confidence in Monti, who has a reputation as a competent, boring, technocrat, a good reputation to have at such times, and the value of the euro climbed through December and into January of this year.

The most recent fall-off, since the January peak, may represent more a strengthening of the US dollar than a weakening of the euro.